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" Vampire Weekend used to be such an easy band to hate. When they first started generating a phenomenal amount of buzz back in 2007 (prior to their self-titled debut the following year), they projected an aura of swank, unexamined privilege interwoven with East Coast boarding school precociousness and the self-satisfied cultural colonialist attitude of someone who&amp;#039;s just discovered the world music section of iTunes and feels like a superior person because of it. They referred to their music as &amp;quot;Upper West Side Soweto&amp;quot; and seemed to have no idea how obnoxious that was. Their verbose, undeniably hooky songs like &amp;quot;Oxford Comma&amp;quot; proved that it was possible to thoroughly love a song while rolling your eyes wildly at it. Modern Vampires of the City, out today, is a far different creature from their first two albums, as is the group who made it. Front man Ezra Koenig and multi-instrumentalist/arranger Rostam Batmanglij, the group&amp;#039;s creative core, are both closing in on their thirties, and that seems to have shaken something loose in their heads. There&amp;#039;s a preoccupation with aging that pops up again and again throughout the album, from the punningly-titled anti-YOLO neo-rockabilly lead single &amp;quot;Diane Young&amp;quot; to the rootless music festival goer at the center of &amp;quot;Ya Hey,&amp;quot; with Koenig repeatedly returning to the theme of twentysomethings reaching the end of their extended adolescence and reckoning with the task of finally becoming adults.      The preoccupation with putting away childish things isn&amp;#039;t just a lyrical subject \u2014 it runs to the very heart of the album. Koenig and Batmanglij have shed much of their near-pathological need to show off how smart and cultured they are. They&amp;#039;ve outgrown their reliance on painfully obscure literary references, two-dollar words, and self-conscious borrowing from Jamaican dancehall and Congolese kwassa kwassa music. They&amp;#039;re still smart and still open-eared, but those aspects have evolved from affectation to a more deeply synthesized part of the band&amp;#039;s personality, and are deployed with far less self-congratulation.  Nowhere is this new grasp of subtlety more apparent than on &amp;quot;Step,&amp;quot; which is not only the best track on the album but one of the loveliest pieces of music to come out this year. According to a lengthy and informative Q&amp;amp;amp;A with NPR, it&amp;#039;s based on an unreleased song by the cultishly adored &amp;#039;90s Bay Area rap group Souls of Mischief, or more specifically on the Grover Washington, Jr. and YZ songs that it samples. It&amp;#039;s a stunningly impressive display of VW&amp;#039;s musicological skills, made even more impressive by the fact that they do nothing to call attention to it. They don&amp;#039;t need to, either \u2014 the song doesn&amp;#039;t need the attached trivia to make it as close to perfect as the band&amp;#039;s ever come. The melody&amp;#039;s deceptively simple and casually heartbreaking. There&amp;#039;s a harpsichord part that somehow manages to avoid sounding ostentatious. And Koenig gives the most subtly profound performance of his career to date. Part of the vocal on the chorus was recorded using the mic on Batmanglij&amp;#039;s laptop at his Brooklyn apartment, and behind Koenig&amp;#039;s voice you can hear the trains rolling by outside. It&amp;#039;s a deeply intimate moment, finally hearing the shell of affectations he&amp;#039;s built up fall away to reveal a tender human heart behind them. -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a22599/vampire-weekend-modern-vampires-review/>